Peter Vatistas

Finally a solid and customizable alternative to Apple iTunes! Just like Firefox, Songbird is community powered, open source, cross platform media player from the creators of Firefox, supporting a variety of media devices including ipods and MTP devices.

Personalize your player:

Discover music:

Sync your device:

Click here to learn more and download Songbird.

The Ubuntu Live 2008 conference, which was scheduled to take place July 21-22 in Portland, OR has been canceled. Canonical plans to include some Ubuntu content in the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), also happening July 21-25 in Portland, Oregon.

For the official statement and more information please refer to the Ubuntu Live webpage.

If your stuck trying to think of new ways to generate more traffic (especially recurring traffic) to your website you may want to look into some form of point or reward system. People by nature are competitive and have a drive to win, adding this environment to your site may prove beneficial.

Already there are hundreds of sites on the net that utilize this and many base the majority of their revenues off of it. I am not interested in the systems out their that actually payout to their member base, like a revshare affiliate program, I like the programs that allow you to turn in your points for custom features, better exposure, stickers & t-shirts, and more.

There are several ways to accomplish this, the following is my favorite and the only one I am going to talk about :

- Using an internal affiliate program to provide your members with a unique URL. The more people that click on a members unique URL, the more points they earn. When those clicked unique URL’s turn into conversions, even more points are earned. Look at this very popular gaming site called Outwar, they follow this model almost to a “T” and make hundreds of thousands of dollars doing so.

This method, if not monitored closely and built around a solid TOS, can hurt you as it may be considered SPAM by sites (forums, blogs, etc) receiving these posted URLs. Just be smart about it. That being said, this method can grow your traffic like crazy; let’s say for example that you have 10 members - everyday each member can recruit 10 more people from their unique URL’s and everyday half of them sign up and continue to recruit more members. I’ll let you do the math here but after 30 days your member base is considerably larger and growing! Obviously this is a picture perfect scenario but I hope you see what I am trying to get at here.

If you have a monthly membership fee, and award can be a free month membership or even a more exclusive membership only earned by playing the game. The list goes on and on with things you can provide your members that play along.

Now for you, the webmaster or marketing guy, this will really build your traffic and exposure for your ad campaigns. Hopefully there is something to your site aside from this point system that keeps the members around and is complimented by the point & reward system.

I am currently developing a system like this using an open source ad management application and an open source affiliate program. I will also be using an open source shopping cart for the points to be cashed in at. The reason why I am tying the ad management application into the mix is to provide members with the ability to earn revshare off of ad zones placed on their personal pages (i.e. forum posts, blogs, articles, etc).

The more you give to your members/readers/surfers, the more they will want to give to you - just play fair. Don’t ask form 1,000 sign ups for a t-shirt - you’ll be stuck with 1,000 t-shirts!

Although its nice not having to rely on anything Microsoft anymore there are some things I need to properly do my job, one of which is testing our websites on all web browsers through dev. I recently came across this neat application that allows me to run Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (IE4, IE5, & IE6) on Ubuntu (as well as most distro’s of Linux).

IEs4Linux also is working hard on their next release which allows “us” Linux users to run Microsoft IE7!! I’ve been playing with the beta release of Internet Explorer 7 on Ubuntu and you can download the beta here.

IEs4Linux is probably the easiest app I have installed and works wonderfully in Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). It’s there when I need it and it’s fast, all three versions.

To install IEs4Linux you have to enable universe packages first. It is also recommended that you use the official winehq ubuntu package:

1) Open a terminal

2) Open /etc/apt/sources.list

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

3) Uncomment (or add) following lines:

deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu edgy universe

4) Add this line:

deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt edgy main

5) Close gedit. Update and install wine and cabextract:

wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine cabextract

6) Download IEs 4 Linux and install

wget http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/downloads/ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
tar zxvf ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
cd ies4linux-*
./ies4linux

Note for Dapper users: if you use ubuntu dapper, replace edgy with dapper on lines above. Note for Feisty users (7.04): if you use ubuntu Feisty, replace edgy with feisty in the lines above. Also replace gedit with kedit if running Kubuntu instead of Ubuntu.

For more information or steps to install on other distro’s please visit IEs4Linux.

If you find this application useful please donate here - this open source app was developed by Sérgio Luís Lopes Júnior, a 21 year old college student in Brazil. I always donate - it is really important to keep these guys (and kids) going.